For Respublika it has been a long battle for survival. In September bailiffs seized the opposition newspaper's entire print run.

Working through the night, reporters retrieved the proofs from a USB flash disk, photocopied them, and stapled them together. By 7am they had churned out 2,000 homemade copies – not exactly a big edition, but a small symbolic victory in the struggle for media freedom in Kazakhstan.

Respublika's long-running scrap with officialdom isn't unusual for Central Asia, a region not known for its pluralism. What makes it extraordinary is that Kazakhstan is about to assume the chairmanship of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Vienna-based body devoted to democracy and press freedom.

On 1 January, Kazakhstan will become the first post-Soviet country to lead the organisation of 56 countries. Since 2007, when member states voted it OSCE chair, Kazakhstan's own record on press freedom has worsened.

Respublika is known for its mocking criticism of Kazakhstan's autocratic government, which has responded by repeatedly trying to close it.

In 2002 Respublika's editorial office mysteriously burned down. The arsonists left a headless dog dangling from a ground-floor window. Attached to it was a note. It read: "You won't get a second warning."

Respublika now appears in text that cannot be read without squinting and is stuck together with a couple of staples. The amateurish format is familiar to anyone who remembers the late Soviet Union. "We're the new samizdat," Respublika's deputy editor-in-chief, Oxana Makushina, explains in the paper's small office in Almaty, Kazakhstan's attractive former capital on the edge of the snowy Tian Shan mountains. "When we outwitted the bailiffs we felt triumphant. The next day all of our copies sold out immediately."

Other Central Asian countries share Kazakhstan's iron-fist approach to critical newspapers. A bunch of variously repressive super-presidents rule all five post-communist Central Asian republics: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Kazakhstan's ageing leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has been in the job for 18 years. He shows no signs of retiring.

On the eve of its OSCE chairmanship, Kazakhstan's broader human rights record is also causing alarm. On 3 September the country's most famous human rights activist, Yevgeny Zhovtis, was jailed for four years for knocking down and killing a pedestrian. Zhovtis does not deny his role in the accident, but his unusually harsh punishment has provoked concern among human rights activists and western governments.

Government officials have tightened the screw on critical publications. Last January Ramazan Esergepov, the editor of the Alma-Ata info portal, was arrested after publishing documents revealing corruption inside Kazakhstan's spy agency. He got three years in jail. Then in April the opposition newspaper Tasjargan was closed down after reporting on a long-running scandal involving claims that a US oil fixer paid Nazarbayev and his associates $78m in bribes.

Kazakhstan's alarming slide on press freedom has embarrassed the EU countries, led by Germany, that backed its OSCE candidacy. The Germans believed that giving the job to Kazakhstan would show that the OSCE was not a closed western club but was open to the former communist states of eastern Europe. They also argued that democratic reform would be stimulated inside Kazakhstan, which would then serve as a model for the rest of the region. In fact, the opposite happened.

Over the summer Kazakhstan passed a repressive internet law and legislation on defamation – in effect a prohibition on stories about corrupt officials.

At a meeting earlier this month in Athens, OSCE foreign ministers expressed concern at Kazakhstan's democratic slide. Kazakhstan, however, appears indifferent to western criticism. Analysts say its leadership is more worried about internal revolt than international hand-wringing by European and US human rights groups. "The new media laws are a legacy of the economic crisis and the Soviet mentality of our ruling elite," Adil Kaukenov, a political analyst based in Almaty, said. "They don't know how to do it any differently."

According to Kaukenov, Kazakhstan was making modest progress on democratic issues until late 2007. Then the credit that had fuelled the country's economic boom – it is Central Asia's most prosperous nation – suddenly dried up. Officials were terrified that Kazakhstan might become engulfed in the kind of pro-reform uprising that took place in 2005 in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, he said.(Kyrgyzstan's so-called Tulip revolution has since fizzled out.)

As well as muzzling the media, Kazakhstan's elite has been busy with another project: transforming the president into a mythical national super-figure. Already nicknamed "papa", Nazarbayev is now portrayed by state-run television as a revered global statesman. Nightly broadcasts include fawning testimonies from old school chums and ordinary Kazakhs. Astana, the gleaming new capital in the northern steppes, has just got its first Nazarbayev statue.

Kazakhstan's OSCE chairmanship is central to this giddy PR offensive.

Kazakhstan has proposed that, as well as hosting a meeting of foreign ministers next December, it holds the first OSCE summit for a decade to be attended by heads of state. A summit would pander to Nazarbayev's increasingly messianic pretensions. Analysts suggest it would also enable Kazakhstan to assert its regional leadership role over its Central Asian neighbours.

The man who lobbied for Kazakhstan to get the OSCE job was Rakat Aliyev, Nazarbayev's former son-in-law. Aliyev, now the president's bitter enemy, suggested the idea when he was Kazakhstan's ambassador to Austria. He fell out with Nazarbayev in 2007 and has since been divorced from the president's daughter, sentenced to 20 years in prison for plotting a coup and stripped of all privileges.

Exiled in Vienna, Aliyev has been avenging himself against his former father-in-law. Aliyev was once head of Kazakhstan's committee on national security – the country's equivalent of the KGB – and he has posted dozens of compromising conversations with Nazarbayev on his LiveJournal blog. Kazakhstan responded by banning LiveJournal in 2008. It also pulled the plug on the satellite TV channel K+ after it broadcast an interview with Aliyev.

According to Andrei Grozin, an expert from Moscow's Institute for the Study of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the group of former Soviet republics, Kazakhstan's power structures are engulfed in a vicious clan war, with the security services pitted against the financial police and the prosecutor. "Aliyev's departure has been the trigger for the complete restructuring of the elite field in Kazakhstan," Grozin said.

Opposition politicians express little optimism that Kazakhstan will change. Nazarbayev, who turns 70 next year, has failed to anoint a successor. None of Kazakhstan's elections have met OSCE standards: widespread ballot-box stuffing and refusal of registration for opposition parties has been alleged. The parliament has only one party – the ruling pro-presidential Nur-Otan faction won all the seats at the last election in 2007.

"Nazarbayev is surrounded by a load of toadies. They are prepared to do anything, not because they love him but because they see his epoch coming to an end,'' Zharmakhan Tuyakbay, the head of the opposition Azat party, said. "They want big political positions."

Tuyakbay, who stood unsuccessfully against Nazarbayev in the 2005 presidential election, said Kazakhstan had duped the Europeans over the OSCE. "It's absurdly cynical. Kazakhstan isn't orientated towards the west. It's merely using the OSCE so it can boast to Kazakhs it leads Europe."

Respublika's latest troubles, meanwhile, began earlier this year when it reported that the state-owned BTA Bank was on the brink of bankruptcy. The bank sued the weekly newspaper for damages. A court near Almaty upheld the bank's claim, fined the weekly $401,000, and threw its print run in a lorry. Government critics say that Respublika is an irresponsible scandal-sheet. Its journalists say that the court proceedings are merely another politically driven attempt to crush the title.

Kazakh officials insist that the country's media laws are not repressive but merely an attempt to strike a balance between media freedom and the interests of national security. "I would strongly argue that there has been no concerted effort to stifle dissent, as people would like to say," Roman Vassilenko, chairman of Kazakhstan's foreign ministry international information committee, said.

He added: "Reporters need to know the rules of the game."

Vassilenko pointed out that the OSCE wasn't just concerned with democratic values but had two other "baskets" – security and economics. 'It's a major misunderstanding in western Europe that the OSCE is only about monitoring elections and promoting human rights," he said. Kazakhstan, which had successfully avoided conflict between its ethnic Kazakh, Russian and other populations, planned to host an OSCE conference on tolerance and diversity, he said.